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American pastoral

Ignored by male critics and obscured by feminist readings and biographies, Willa Cather's fiction hasn't always been given the recognition it deserves. Her understated stories of the stoicism, passion and violence of frontier life contain the mysteries of great writing, argues AS Byatt

Willa Cather was a great novelist, whose greatness was unrecognised for a long time. I had been teaching American literature for some years when I first met a reference to her - in Ellen Moers's Literary Women, in an intriguing discussion of sexualised landscape. In the 1980s Virago republished all her books, and I wrote introductions to most of them. It was an extraordinary experience - a meeting with a style, a subject matter, a narrative method and a vision of the nature of things I found profoundly alien, and discovered were of the utmost importance to me as a writer.

I had always responded to American women poets and British women novelists. Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Ann Carson. Austen, Eliot, the Brontes, Bowen, Murdoch and Fitzgerald. Cather did not fit into any of the provisional categories in my mind - women, the 1920s, American fiction. She was a successful journalist and a much admired writer in her lifetime, though it was unfortunate - and symptomatic of her fate - that she won the Pulitzer prize in 1922 for One of Ours, a novel that does not quite work, about the first world war. Americans I met when I was writing those first introductions usually knew only My Antonia , and saw her as a writer they read at school, who specialised in "local colour" about frontier life. The theorists of American literature - Richard Chase and Leslie Fiedler, writing when I was teaching - ignored her completely. Malcolm Bradbury, who introduced much American literature to Britain, omitted her from his comprehensive survey. Hugh Kenner, a great critic, in A Home-Made World , a wonderful book on stay-at-home modern Americans (as opposed to modernist Americans in Paris) - does not mention her either. I thought when I began my reading for Virago that we were giving new life to a neglected, good writer. But Cather is not just a good writer - she is unique, and great.

She was born in 1873 and died in 1947. She was a modernist when Dos Passos, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were boys, and was seen as out-of-date when they were writing, without having been understood. The more recent interest in her work among feminist critics and biographers has also to a certain extent obscured the fierceness and power of her writing. Cather was an intensely private woman, who shared much of her life with her friend Edith Lewis. Her papers are in the University of Nebraska; she left them on condition that her letters should never be quoted. There have been attempts to claim her for lesbian feminism, and attempts to criticise her for using male narrators, or to see those narrators as oppressive presences in a way she would have found nonsensical. All this is described, with passion and good humour, in an excellent brief book, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, by Joan Acocella. There is also an excellent and wise biography by Hermione Lee.

She has been steadily admired by stylists. Alice Munro learned from her; Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Wallace Stevens praised her perceptively. She learned from Virgil, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Henry James. She wrote 12 novels and some remarkable long and short stories.

Her work can be divided into three periods. Between 1912 and 1918 she wrote novels about life in Nebraska, where she lived in her childhood. Between 1923 and 1926 she wrote what have been called her "tragic" novels, full of energy describing the end of energy. Her last two great novels - Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock , the first set in New Mexico and the second in Quebec, are about the time of the land, and the brevity and tenacity of human habitations in those lands. Each of these reinvents the novel form to look at a new human world, although their newness is contained in an extraordinary lucidity rather than in any overt "experiment".

What did she write about? Acocella says "the great subject of early 20th-century literature, the gulf between the mind and the world". This is perceptive. Cather wrote about the subject of Ecclesiastes, the rising and setting of the sun, the brevity of life, the relation between dailiness and the rupture of dailiness, the moment when "desire shall fail". One of the virtues of her writing that I notice all the time, and find hard to describe, is the distance at which she stands from her text. Part of what I mean by this is contained in the fact that more than any other novelist she see her people's lives as whole and finished - they feel stress and passion, they discover and lose, but they are bounded by birth and death, by nothing and nothing, and they move between the two, adjusting their consciousnesses as they go. The writer always sees the people's lives whole and complete, wherever the story is along their line.

Her own statements about her work are both terse and illuminating. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), is a good novel about an engineer who builds a bridge which collapses. Her second, O Pioneers! (1913) was, she claimed, the one where she had found her own way of telling - with "no arranging or inventing; everything was spontaneous and took its own place right or wrong ... Since I wrote this book for myself I ignored all the situations and accents that were then generally thought to be necessary." What she means by "situations and accents" is both dramatic tension and the scenes of confrontation or discovery towards which most novels move. O Pioneers! is a long, slow-paced series of visions or tableaux of the lives of the Swedish farmers on the Great Plains. It tells of planting and harvest, passionate love and murder, in the same inevitable, calm tone. Cather's friend ES Sergeant records that she complained to Cather that the only flaw in the book was that it had no sharp skeleton, and elicited the reply:

"... true enough, I had named a weakness. But the land has no sculptured lines or features. The soil is soft, light, fluent, black, for the grass of the plains creates this type of soil as it decays. This influences the mind and memory of the author and so the composition of the story."

Soft, light, fluent, black. Also tough - Cather in this book writes as much about human stoicism as about human passion. The heroine's father observes her energy and liveliness as she works. Cather writes: "But he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became." There is the same sense of slowness and inevitability in her characterisation of Alexandra, sitting in a rocking chair with her Swedish bible. "Her body was in an attitude of perfect repose, such as it was apt to take when she was thinking earnestly. Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least spark of cleverness."

This sense of life, birth, death and drama taking place on the undifferentiated black soil as the earth moves steadily through the seasons might be expected to have a pastoral charm, at the most. But Cather's prose gives it a grim and exciting sense of mortality.

My Antonia , which is about the life of Bohemian immigrants, is narrated by Jim Burden, a classicist who understands Virgilian pastoral, and the similarities and differences between that and the harsh life of the settlers in the untouched landscape. He goes to Harvard and the city. Antonia, his neighbour, energetic and hopeful, stays on the earth, becoming a young toothless matriarch, still with grace and warmth. The Bohemians live in sod houses and sleep in cellars that are no more than holes in the plain. Their sod houses and the hummocks of their graves are much the same - protrusions from the earth that go back into it. Cather's control of her startling steady pace is more assured here - when she is rhapsodic, she does it briefly and elegiacally. And convincingly. Huge and terrible things happen, are given their due weight, and are reabsorbed into the soft, light, fluent black and brightness. Mr Shimerda, Antonia's father, desperate with grief for lost Hungary, commits suicide in the winter, laying aside his boots and clean shirt so that they shall not be blood-spattered. The extreme cold freezes the corpse and the pools of spilled blood, so that his death is perpetuated, as he can neither be laid out nor buried until the air is warmer. This frozen tragedy - which has also an atmosphere of practical housekeeping - becomes a tableau which haunts the reader, as it must haunt his family, but the narrative moves steadily on. In the summer, in the harvest, there is a rapid death - a wandering tramp suddenly and for no known reason jumps into the threshing machine and is dismembered. Antonia remarks that it is odd to imagine anyone wanting to do that in the good season of harvest and threshing. Both deaths are lightly told and unforgettable. They stain the reader's mind with a peculiar precision, partly because of the lack of conventional dramatic emphasis.

The Song of the Lark (1915) appeared before My Antonia . It is the one of Cather's novels that most resembles other novels, in that it is a biography, and studies ambition, achievement and even love and passion in a reasonably conventional manner. It is the story of Thea Kronborg, a provincial girl from Moonstone, Colorado, who becomes a great operatic soprano, singing Wagner in the opera houses of America and Europe. It has appealed to the general public, and sold better than most of her other work. Cather herself found it problematic, and reissued it in 1932, having cut it savagely and removed nearly a 10th of the text. She wrote an essay in 1931, describing how William Heinemann had turned it down, and agreeing with his reasoning. She wrote an introduction to the cut version, explaining her reasons for the changes. Both are to do with an artist's sense of form, and its relation to the life of the artist. In the Preface she compares the artist's life to Oscar Wilde's story of Dorian Gray in reverse. The more successful the artist, the more the personal life becomes "somewhat dry and preoccupied". "[Thea's] artistic life is the only one in which she is happy or free, or even very real." Kronborg absorbs and uses the life of her childhood in her art, but does not break her working life to return to her mother's deathbed. Cather came to feel that her own novel should have concentrated on the struggle to escape provincial philistinism and should not have detailed the growing strength of the successful singer. But the real problem was that she had chosen the wrong style - as she saw it - for her own art. Her remarks about Heinemann's rejection are splendidly revealing.

"He thought that in that book I had taken the wrong road, and that the full-blooded method which told everything about everybody, was not natural to me, and was not the one in which I would ever take satisfaction. 'As for myself,' he wrote, 'I always find the friendly, confidential tone of writing of this sort distressingly familiar, even when the subject matter is very fine.'"

The Cather who eschewed the intimate, confidential note in writing liked to use painting as an image for what she was trying to achieve. She was interested in fresco, and in the work of the French symbolist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

"I had all my life wanted to do something in the style of legend, which is absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment. Since I first saw the Puvis de Chavannes frescoes of the life of St Genevieve in my student days, I have wished that I could try something like that in prose; something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition. In The Golden Legend the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt on than are the trivial incidents of their lives; it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance. The essence of such writing is not to hold the note - not to use an incident for all there is in it - but to touch and pass on."

Van Gogh said that Puvis de Chavannes's work represented a "strange and providential meeting of very far- off antiquities and crude modernity". Cather's classicism, her fresco-like structures, and her violence, represent the same collision. Chavannes's faraway, mysterious figures influenced the classicism of some of Picasso's early representational paintings. Another analogy might be to the American modernism of William Carlos Williams, with his belief in "no ideas but in things", his simply stated red wheelbarrow, and his anthology of the western discovery of America, In the American Grain . In that book he constructs a patchwork of voices of the dead who struggled to describe a place and a way of life that had never previously been described. Cather too is deeply concerned with forging a language and a series of images to represent the new, the unwritten.
Another comparison Cather used came from the domestic stillness of Dutch and Flemish paintings of interiors. "In many of them the scene presented was a living-room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. But in most of the interiors, whether drawing-room or kitchen, there was a square window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships, or a stretch of grey sea. The feeling of the sea that one got through those square windows was remarkable, and gave me a sense of the fleets of Dutch ships that ply quietly in all the waters of the globe ..."

In her 50s Cather published three novels which are often called tragedies - A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's House (1925) and My Mortal Enemy (1926). Both A Lost Lady and The Professor's House are tragic in the sense that they present the slow process described in the Book of Ecclesiastes:

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them ... when the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.

Both novels present a vision of the youth and strength of the early European explorers and settlers of north America as a kind of primeval Eden, full of light and life, which has fallen away into vulgarity, real estate, ugly urban life. The decay of the pioneering vision of the land goes with the ageing of the central characters. In A Lost Lady the young male narrator idealises Marian Forrester, the beautiful and generous wife of a railway pioneer who loses his fortune compensating his shareholders in a market crash. She degenerates, taking lovers, drinking, becoming shoddy and shabby, and even becomes the mistress of the snake in the garden, the evil Ivy Peters, who is first seen putting out the eyes of a woodpecker for fun. Desire fails, both in narrator and his beloved, and is replaced by world-weariness.

I sometimes think The Professor's House is Cather's masterpiece. It is almost perfectly constructed, peculiarly moving, and completely original. It is the story of Godfrey St Peter, a successful professor whose great work has been a history of "Spanish Adventurers in North America". The adventurers are related to the railway pioneers in A Lost Lady - Cather herself compares both to the crusaders, brave men with a vision. In an early essay (1896) on "The Kingdom of Art" the young Cather had compared the daring artist also to the crusaders, who suffered and died in the burning deserts, and found no paradise - "only death and the truth". St Peter is happily married, with two daughters. He lives near the shore of Lake Michigan. The novel is the tale of his experience of the failure of desire. There are two "houses" - a brand-new one, purchased with the prize-money he won for his masterpiece, into which he is expected to move, and the old house, where he persists in working in his old study, which doubles as a sewing-room, and is inhabited by two dressmakers' "forms" - one made of "a dead opaque, lumpy solidity, like chunks of putty or tightly packed sawdust", one in wire, with no legs, no viscera, and a bosom like a bird-cage. They are household gods, turned to lifeless yet threatening idols.

At this point I must emphasise the other side of Cather, the teller of tales about great journeys, hard endeavours, single-mindedness. She can describe domestic comforts, the minutiae of pots, pans, food, so as to make them glittering and strange, as though seen for the first time. She wrote perceptively about Katherine Mansfield and her great gift for showing the simultaneous beauty and terror of group life, domestic life. She studies French domestic subtleties, tended by women, or by priests, in alien American landscapes, hot New Mexico, cold Quebec. She believes passionately in civilisation, as Virgil saw it, as the Dutch painters recorded it in their domestic interiors. In the essay on Mansfield she describes human relationships as "the tragic necessity of human life; they can never be wholly satisfactory, every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them".

The professor has sought them, and is now pulling away from them.

The triumph of the novel is the story inserted into it. "Tom Outland's Story" is the tale of a brilliant young man, who later became the professor's student, made a scientific discovery of a gas that left him rich, and died in the first world war, before he could marry St Peters's daughter, to whom he left his patents.

In the inserted story he explores a mesa in New Mexico, working as a cattle driver. The golden silence of New Mexico, the thin air of the heights, the riding and work, are the equivalent in this novel of the grey seas glimpsed through the window in a Dutch painting. In it Outland discovers "a little city of stone, asleep". "I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilisation, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber."

Cather said she wanted to juxtapose the stone city, the "fresh air that blew off the Blue Mesa" with "Professor St Peter's house, rather over-crowded and stuffy with new things; American proprieties, clothes furs, petty ambitions, quivering jealousies". The young man, Outland, on the uninhabited mesa feels pure energy. "Nothing tired me. Up there, alone, a close neighbour to the sun, I seemed to get the solar energy in some direct way." Cather describes the sun, the rock, the jars made by the vanished people, the mysterious body of a woman, violently killed, so that each detail is unforgettable. Then she returns us to St Peter, in danger of dying from escaping house-gas on his lumpy sofa, thinking grimly of Longfellow's translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem about a third kind of house.

For thee a house was builtEre thou wast born;For thee a mould was madeEre thou of woman camest.

He is reminded by his sagging sofa of "the sham upholstery that is put in coffins".

"Just the equivocal American way of dealing with serious facts, he reflected. Why pretend that it is possible to soften that last hard bed." He thinks he would rather be alone in the grave than with his wife - whom he loves. "He thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness, as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth."

No one has written better about the pull of solitude. Most novels are about human relations. This one is about the desire to be released from them. Nietzsche thought a "strong pessimism" was what human beings needed. It is paradoxically invigorating.

My Mortal Enemy is a real tragedy, constructed out of a real romance - the story of a rich and determined young woman, who ran away with a penniless lover, seen through the eyes of a much younger woman narrator. This story too is of the failing of desire - a failing so complete that the "heroine" comes to refer to her loving and patient husband as "my mortal enemy". The word mortal here is of course, completely double. A mortal enemy is a determined destroyer. A mortal enemy is simply a mortal man. The book is brief, and at first I liked it less than some of the apparently stranger and more complicated ones. But the writer in me thinks about it now almost more than about any other. In it Cather has completely achieved her aim of telling by showing, and showing by making an arrested, mysterious image. Nellie Birdseye, the narrator is a good observer of things and expressions, pleasant and unpleasant, about the not-entirely romantic Myra. Each brief, glancing episode is a perfect revelation of something new and unexpected. It is still and violent. Not one word is wasted or redundant. It is distant and at the same time unbearably moving. The writer knows completely the tale she is telling, its beginning and its end.